Open Source w/ Low Power FM Stations 25
deacon brown asks: "My employer has just acquired the license to operate a low power FM station in the area (on a tight budget, of course). Because of our location, I'm the only local tech guy, so they might need my help setting this thing up. I can't do it at the job, but I'd LOVE to make Open Source work for this radio station, so I can keep the costs as low as possible. Does anyone have experience setting up, or operating, Radio stations? How should I go about getting information together, to have a go at this?
I know they're some areas where I'll need to buy some hardware to do a job (mixers, etc), but are there software solutions like (e.g. the Linux phone switch) for other parts?" While there have been a few helpful articles on this subject, I think they more dealt with the hardware side, rather than the software side of the equation. What operations and infrastructure can you see Open Source handling in a small radio station?
Uninterrupted Broadcast Daemon (Score:5, Interesting)
The Uninterrupted Broadcast Daemon. Check it out. It may suit your needs.
Re:Sheesh. (Score:3, Interesting)
the biggest problems include the law, like having the rights to broadcast at all and then paying for the royalties.
on the technical side, while I was doing the army service(finnish army, mandatory - not for fun but the quickest way to get rid of it honestly is to do it) I had the privilidge of hosting/some minor techincal stuff on a a war practice radio(playing music that got interrupted every now and then by fake airplane announcements we would made up. sometimes I felt bad for the guys who were camping and listening to that stuff and supposedly ducking whenever we announced an airplane, not!).
anyways, the setup was real easy, basically we would go to a transmit tower to set up the command trailer we had our stuff in and then have some guy with clearance to attach the antenna attach it high(like 20-30m from ground or something, the antenna itself was like a 1m*1m thingy). then just attach the fm-modulator,amp, mixer, audio sources and mics - and voila, everythings ready to go. I'd imagine the most expensive pieces to have been the amp and the mixer, mixers can be had for pretty cheap though and there's some radio amplifier kits around if you can't afford a real one(again though, I'd think it to be pretty cheap compared to running costs involved). We had around 100w of transmit power and that was supposedly good for at least ~30-40km radius(fm signal).
If you'd use&trust the computer you wouldn't even need the mixer since you could mix your speech in with that, we started with using 2 cd decks, but pretty soon switched to encoding them to the laptop in mp3 and playing from there, that way we didn't need to be swapping cd's every 3 minutes(we used a cassette deck for playing out interviews though). We didn't need to pay royalties(special arrangement, we just needed to take up names of songs for 10minutes per every hour) so that made the thing quite smooth since we didn't need to care about the evil, boring, costly things involved in running a radio.
If you wouldn't need to worry about the legalese side of things running a station would be dead easy and cheap as well(the transmit powers are quite low, opposite of what some people mistakenly think, as said that 100w was plenty for a 'local' station).
Heck I sometimes dream about starting to run a pirate radio and plan on how I would have the transmitter on something mobile to avoid getting caught too quick, like mounting it on a van or something.
running a real radio doesn't differ _that_ much from running an internet radio(shoutcast), you could pretty easily use the easy tools made for that as well.